So what would you recommend we use instead?
You may also wish to consider looking for devices which are based on a switch, rather than a bulb. Controllable bulbs do not play nice with the state of physical light switches, and in the case of multi-bulb fixtures, bulb solutions may be excessively expensive. Meanwhile, a smart switch plays nice with physical users and can control as many bulbs as you want.
I installed a few INSTEONS in my house and got bit badly when they just stopped communicating. The most frustrating thing is that there's no diagnostic tool, so I can't tell if the switches are broken or if their signals are getting sent but aren't understood by intended recipients.
Next time I get deeply into home automation, I'll make sure to use a kit that includes tools for sensing wifi signal and diagnosing bad connections.
Even today, I have the ability to control nearly all the lights on the main floor of my house with an app on my phone. I actually use this feature maybe once or twice a year, being generous. Even if my phone is on me and already unlocked (due to being in my house), I have to pull it out, swipe the screen, launch an app, wait for it to load, then find the lights I want and click to turn on. Or I can press the switch on the wall next to me.
Or, even better, a timer/motion sensor has already turned on the light for me and I don't even have to think about it. This is what real home automation is all about.
I might get some more bulbs (mi.light) if I start finding more uses but for now it seems pretty niche.
But yeah, 90% of the time, if I am turning on a light, I'm hitting the physical switch. So a bulb that is ignorant of my switch's position isn't a lot of use to me. Because if I want to turn that bulb on... my switch is probably already off. And the bulb can't work if the physical switch is off.
And doesn't involve a wall switch.
Of course, a fully integrated system with switch/dimmer modules in the electrical system is nice, but not really an option in many situations (e.g. renters). Control purely by a phone is certainly not ideal, but is a simplest useable solution you can build on, with additional hardware, apps for special functions, ...
Exchanging batteries in additional lightswitches seems stupid, but doesn't happen THAT often. You can add them if you want them, others make do with the phone and maybe NFC tags or other tricks.
Sure, if I owned the place or would be staying here for many years it might be worth it, but not yet.
These basic sets require very low effort to get started, and THEN people are interested.
I hope I got my point across better now, it's kinda late here.
These kludges are slowly getting better: maybe you can get a menu bar app so you can control your lights from the computer, maybe your phone/tablet light app can stick some buttons in an Android widget or in the iOS notifications pulldown, there are even people trying to make switches that you can stick over the normal switches and hit to trigger light changes without having to hire/be an electrician who can replace the switches.
It's a widget in your notifications bar and your lock screen with buttons for remote control. Also has a smartwatch app. I use it all the time and it's so much faster than the official Hue app.
And I wrote a little app that lives in my Mac's menu bar and lets me pick from the scenes I set up in the official app, too, someday I should actually package it up properly. (https://github.com/egypturnash/weatherlight)
DerbyCon presentation by Crypt0s: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bl4PdLQW-8I
I have one and it has been widely unreliable from day one.
It does not default to on when you use the light switch, so you always have to use the app to interact with it. Half the time, the app fails to detect it. The rest of the time, it can take random amounts of time for it to respond.
It also likes to randomly light up red in the middle of the night or to flicker very rapidly (absolutely unbearable).
I have just removed it and replaced with a dumb light.
Random color changes or flickering sounds like a defective bulb, I'm sure they'd replace it for you if you contacted them.
I am not really willing to throw more money their way though.
https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/world-s-most-affordable-w...
They're much less expensive than Hue, support IFTTT integration, and seem to be much more open in spirit than Philips' offering.
Insteon doesn't seem well enough documented for third party controller implementations to me, although there are third party controllers available.
Z-Wave (distinctively different from Zigbee) are the main contender for me right now. They seem to have the most interoperability but it is still a closed protocol in that documentation isn't freely available. But access higher up in the stack does seem easier. It looks like I'll be able to act as a controller, rather than being forced to talk to one.
I like Insteon's dual signaling and bridging capability (between radio and signaling through the mains) but it has very limited security and it looks tricky for me to put a controller together myself (which as a developer is my test for openness).
X10 (supported by Insteon devices) has no security and is quite limited, so I don't want to invest in that now.
Since I've been so unhappy with home automation software I've found, not doing exactly what I want, I've started building my own in VB .NET. The basics, plus what I specifically want it to do.
X10 is outright terrible. It was designed before nearly as much signal interference existed on powerline, so now you need tons of phase couplers and filters to get a good signal. INSTEON's mesh network (and dual-band powerline/RF) jumps signal issues far better. INSTEON's newer devices also drop support for X10, FYI.
Any help, please? For example, let's say that I want to buy a USB interface (for a controller), a motion sensor, and a light switch (eg. a micro dimmer). I want to plug the USB interface into a modern Linux distribution and speak to it to read motion and the switch and control the light (and configure the switch to operate the light directly without the controller).
Where do I find documentation on:
* What drivers I'll need for the USB interface to get to something I can talk to from userspace, whether this is Free Software, whether I'll need external drivers or not and where I might get these.
* The protocol to speak to the USB interface from userspace.
* The protocol to speak to each of the devices over the interface.
I've spent hours looking, and I only feel that I have half the answers. For example the dimmer is documented at http://www.insteon.com/developer/#devdocs but the motion sensor is not. And I still have no idea about the USB end.
The madreporite.com site I provided above has some decent documentation on device IDs and commands for a lot of devices. And as you can see from the link I provided, communication with the devices is generally pretty simple, 8 or 21 bytes sent over a serial connection, that can be written in a few lines of code. Receiving is a bit more complicated, but he provides sample code for that as well.
I'd think something like Mister House would probably do the sort of simple case you need without figuring out all of the INSTEON protocol.
I'm a developer and I want to hook all kinds of things together. I don't need a GUI but would like full programmatic access. The case I have in mind would start off as a few lines of Python, probably using asyncio or something which is really powerful for this kind of thing. I'd prefer to just write a few lines against an API than have to use a framework, deal with maintaining a larger software deployment, etc.
But you are right that there are holes in their documentation. The code I'm using does a good job showing unknown commands though, so it's pretty easy to fill in what's missing. I think IoT has a lot worse devices, documentation wise.
I've tried them and the Hues. I gave the Hues away to my ex. I've got eight LIFX bulbs in my apartment, and would happily buy more if I was in a bigger place that needed more lighting.
The software that comes with the Razberry acts as a basic controller, but I wrote my own web front-end that talks to their controller over local http. It's all very customizable, and has been very reliable. (I don't know if there are Z-Wave colored lights, though, mine just dim.)
(I'm also integrating a handful of devices I built myself from esp8266's, that communicate over basic http over wifi. I wonder if those could be integrated into one of those frameworks easily?)